Vihal's Many Failures

The first three days were training. Working in threes, each group was given charge of a single Sky Room; and from the fourth day the true trial period began, one Sky Room to each angel.

He was not yet used to working alone, but Vihal had won his way onto the floor of the trade he had longed for—the shaping of weather—and he had thrown himself into it with everything he had.

Today the weather for this district was *fair, cloudy at times*, and the instructions specified that the cloud cover was to be no more than sixty percent.

What Vihal wanted to paint was a sky that seemed to flow across the whole expanse… one that would make whoever saw it, if only for a single moment, stop and stare.

"Haaah… I may be out of a job already…"

Gazing at the spilled white paint, Vihal muttered to himself.

His first failure had come on his very first day.

He had painted too slowly, and with the clock running down he panicked, tripped, and sent every drop of the rainbow paint flying—and down in the world below there appeared a great, strangely shaped cloud of iridescence.

His second failure came on the third day.

Trying to keep ahead of the clock, he had sped up, used far too much paint, and run short. When he went to fetch more, the angel who was his superior asked him, *and why exactly are you coming for a second bucket?*

When he checked properly, he found that his own Sky Room called for a mere five percent of cloud—he had been painting the weather assigned to the room next door.

And then, up until yesterday, he had somehow managed it: laughed at as *hopeless* and *a botched job*, yes, but finished on time, and with the right amount of cloud. So today he had gathered a little courage.

Even if they called him hopeless, he had finally got his timing and his quantities under control—so surely, he had thought, if he painted just a little as he wished, he could still finish inside the time.

Vihal began to paint the clouds as he saw them, and as he did, it grew joyful, and he painted on as if dancing.

And then, lost in it, he stopped seeing anything around him—and the brush, a brush as tall as he was, swung around in his dancing hand, and struck the bucket by sheer bad luck and knocked it over, and the rest of the paint went running out across the floor.

*Don't dance so hard you lose sight of everything*—well, if that was what he was to be told, then that was that.

But to have troubled his superior, and the administrator above his superior—God himself, who had just come storming in—and then the senior angel on the next shift as well, three times over… there was nothing left to say.

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